Hold Onto Your Brain: There Might Be Twice as Many Supermassive Black Holes in The Universe

Surprise!

CARLY CASSELLA

19 APR 2017

A new discovery has potentially doubled the number of supermassive black holes that astronomers thought existed in our Universe.

Supermassive black holes were traditionally thought to be at the centre of all big galaxies, such as our own Milky Way. Now, a new study suggests they could also be at the centre of all dwarf galaxies, too.

Since then, it's remained the smallest known galaxy to house a giant black hole, but now the same team has found two more dwarf galaxies with supermassive black holes, suggesting that perhaps the pairing isn't as uncommon as initially predicted.

With an estimated 7 trillion dwarf galaxies in the visible Universe, this might make supermassive black holes far more prolific than astronomers thought.

Even more impressive, the findings of the recent study reveal that, despite their size, these dwarf galaxies contain black holes even larger than our own.

"Our general picture of how galaxies form is that little galaxies merge to form big galaxies," he added. "But we have a really incomplete picture of that. The ultra-compact dwarf galaxies provide us a longer timeline to be able to look at what's happened in the past."

Dwarf galaxies might be small, but they could hold the answer to some very large questions.